fandomhigh | Shop Class: [1/30]

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Shop Class: [1/30]

When the students arrive, they see the familiar backdrop of the scrap yard in place.

The only thing that would seem different about it would be the large pile of tennis balls sitting in middle of it.

"All right, kids. Today's assignment is to build a tennis ball cannon gun using items you might find here in the scrapyard."

ETA:

The following students will get detention if they do not supply an ~~OOC or IC~~ excuse for missing two classes in a row by next class period (Weds).
Sydney Bristow
Yuffie Kisaragi

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...

John comes into class, listens to the assignment and then scans the scrap yard.

"Hey, I've got a cannon for an arm. Can't I just use that?" John demonstrates by making several exaggerated pitching motions.

Mac chuckled. "Unfortunately, no. That doesn't count. ~~A cannon in your pants would be a entirely different matter~~."

"Worth a try." John smiles and starts to get to work.

John looks around the scrap yard carefully. Finding a long, cylindrical PVC pipe, he cuts off the top half so he's got a pipe with an open top. The tennis ball rolls cleanly through it.

Next, he finds some rubber and checks the elasticity. It's good enough. He nails two ends of the rubber to one end of the pipe so now he's got some sling shot motion going on. He drops the ball at the end near the rubber and lets the rubber band go.

It doesn't work well as the rubber doesn't provide a lot of velocity going out of the pipe. John begins to wonder how he can get more power...

[TBC]

John finally decides to cut the PVC piping down so the travel distance is shorter for the ball and it gives the rubber more time to snap. He oils the pipe up as well.

Then, he actually ditches the rubber and finds an empty, plastic tube that's covered on one end and open on the other. He inserts the open end onto a newly closed, short piece of piping with two open ends, trying to go for an air push this time.

He pulls the container back to the very end and drops a ball into the opposite end of the pipe. Then he pushes down on the plastic container and the ball shoots out. Again, not very good but this is hard!

"Good Job, Crichton. Well thought out."

Nadia's first idea involved a tube, a music stand, several feet of thin rubber tubing, and a broken concertina. But the broken concertina would require drilling and sewing, and frankly, she didn't feel like putting that much effort in.

Her next idea involved springs.

Be thankful she didn't go for that one. Chaos would have ensued. Chaos, I tell you!

Finally, she settled on something ~~boring~~ simple, so as not to strain her shoulder too much. She grabbed two lengths of pvc piping, one only about a centimeter smaller in diameter than the other, some bits of rubber, an AOHell free 100 hours cd, two bike handles, and the superglue.

She glared at the duct tape as she passed by.

the rubber was glued as a cap over the end of the smaller tube, which was then fitted into the larger one. She checked how well it slid, and finding it sticking slightly, trimmed down the rubber and added a touch of oil to make it work faster, without losing the seal. Then she cut the AOHell cd down to size and superglued it about midway down the length of the larger tube. She glued one handle to the non-rubber end of the smaller tube, and one below the AOHell cd in the larger tube. She slid the smaller tube in and out a few times, then shook her head and glued more rubber to it, this time in a circle a few inches in front of the handle, to keep the tube from impactin the AOHell cd in the other tube.

She looked the whole thing over, then cut a tennis-ball sized hole out of the top of the bigger tube just in front of the cd, superglued a third tube to that, and loaded the sucker up with tennis balls.

She tested it by firing one to the left of Mac's head.

She's not the best shot in the world.

The ball bounces of Mac's head. He looks at Nadia with a cocked eyebrow, trying to look scolding but mostly you can tell he's amused.

"Well we can see that it works," Mac said tossing the ball back to Nadia.

Nadia blushed furiously. "Um, yeah." She caught the ball, but then fumbled and dropped it. "I'll aim for something else next time," she promised.

"Feel free to aim anything you need to fire at our TA when she's more mobile. That's what she's here for."

Nadia glanced over, then back at Mac and just raised her eyebrow.

Sam made her way awkwardly into the room on her crutches, sat down, and waved to Mac. "Hey, Mac. Um, I have a slight mobility problem."

"Carter! What the hell happened to you?" Mac said with a stern tone kneeling down to take a look at her bad leg. "You weren't one of those idiots running around out in the snow on Saturday were you?"

Sam smiled slightly. "Er, guilty as charged. I took a coffee cup to the head and a snow shark to the leg. Their teeth are sharper than you'd think."

Mac frowned at Sam and gave her a look of disappointment. "Sam, I know that there are kids around here with superpowers and what not, but you are way too young to be risking your neck like this. I've already lost-"

Mac stopped himself before he mentioned the *other* TA's name from last semester.

"Just promise me you'll be more careful in the future?"

Sam blinked, not used to having people worry about her like this. "I'm not going anywhere. And I may not have superpowers, but I had some unique, er, classes before I came to Fandom."

"I'll always help where I can, Mac. It's the most I can promise."

Mac sighs and gives her a grin. "You're going to do precisely what you want anyway, aren't you?"

She tried to look innocent. "Who, me?" Sam glanced around the room. "So, do you still want me to do the assignment?"

"No!" Mac said in a light scolding tone. "You're to take it easy. Just give advice to the other students. You're grade average won't suffer if you sit out one class. Plus, I'm going to be going out of town tomorrow, so I'll need you to cover for me on Weds. Make up your own class if you want but keep it simple. Don't move around too much and take it easy on the leg. All right?"

Sam may have pouted a little. First she was out of vampire hunting, then Shop. Stupid sharks. "Okay. Any guidelines for the class?"

"Just the usual. Keep everyone alive to the end of it and that there aren't any *real* explosions."

"Sure, take all the fun out of substitute teaching..." Sam grinned.

Xander completely handwaved this because my brain will not wrap around anything more complicated that what Nadia's already done, yet Xander ought to know how to do something like this, especially since he actually owns a marshmallow cannon ended up with a contraption involving plastic piping, glue, and, with a friendly sticking out of his tongue at Nadia, a roll and a half of duct tape - which launched his tennis ball an impressive 13 inches away, with a sickly popping sound that wasn't nearly as impressive as the one that came from his $24.99 mass-marketed marshmallow shooter.

He stared at it rather sadly. "I'd like to think that if I'd managed to sleep in my own bed for more than one night in the last three, I'd have enough functioning braincells to make this thing work. Please indulge me in this fantasy."

Nadia gave Xander a mock-innocent look. "Maybe it'll work better without the duct tape?"

Xander backed ostentatiously away from her, and looked mock-fearfully at the sky. "Hey Mac, what's the radius on lightning strikes? Or do you think God would go after me anyway for questioning his aim?"

Nadia stuck her tongue out at him.

"Nadia? Is there a problem?" Mac says in his best authoratative teaching voice.

Nadia swung around, looking innocent. She of course had no idea that she was now pointing her tennis ball gun back at Mac. I don't know what you're talking about.

"Now. Now. There's a line that one shouldn't cross with their teacher, Ms. Santos." Mac said, still with his authoratative tone.

Nadia hurriedly swung her gun around behind her back and lowered her eyes. "Sorry."

If he listened closely, he could hear her mutter something that sounded distinctly like "stupid duct tape,"

"I'd imagine that they are pretty accurate if it is a smiting," Mac said looking at Nadia with a concerned look. "He's forgiving about *some* things but not others."

Nadia scowled. "Yes, well, my last name means 'saint'. That's got to count for something."

Izzie comes into class, and after scanning the scrap yard begins to play around with some of the items she's pulled from the heap. Prying off the plastic casing on an old toaster, Izzie decides to use this as her launching device. The spring loaded mechanism is perfect. Pop the tennis ball in, press the button, wait a few seconds, and bam! Now all she has to do is figure out how to disconnect the electricity.

After pulling some old pieces of cardboard out of the heap, Izzie sets to work fashioning the rest of her cannon. She secures the cardboard to the toaster using liberal amounts of duct tape.

She places a ball in, hits the trigger, and watches as the ball flys a mere three feet in the air.

She raises her hand. "Mac, I'm done. I don't think it'll ever be used to launch anything at other people, but it works."

"You got it to launch a ball. That's all that matters."

The only reason that Ivanova is not limping into class is because she has crazy willpower-fu. A normal human being would be in a small ball of pain on the floor.

Very, very slowly she began to collect her materials. She used the simple compressed gas cannon, constructing another hobo stove to heat the gas which would propel the tennis ball through a pipe, etc. It took her far longer than normal, as she was heavily favouring her right arm and was very, very ginger when bending over. The cannon worked okay, but not great.

After staring perplexed at the assignment for a few minutes, Duo gets to work. He's just so excited that someone else thought having a cannon gun that could fire tennis balls at high velocity for fun was an awesome idea.

He works for a while with some PVC piping, a barrel for the tennis balls, an ignitor and some hair-spray and eventually ends up with something that sounds something like this. (http://www.beercheckers.com/tennisballgun/) Duo's version isn't quite so accurate and it doesn't shoot very far, but he appears to be extremely overly excited about how wicked the contraption looks.

Kawalsky grabs what's left of the PVC piping and cuts it to an appropriate length. He decided on a combustion cannon. He created the combustion chamber with an aerosol can for fuel and an old lighter as the ignitor. After making sure the combustion chamber was sealed with duct tape, Kawalsky tested the launcher. It didn't go very far, and it had a nasty kick-back, but it worked.

Stark ~~who was late due to the mun being sickly~~ considered the assignment. This could be fun.

After some digging around, he found a short length of PVC pipe that was big enough to allow tennis balls to roll through it. A spring attached to a metal plate cut to size worked for the firing mechanism. Pull on the spring, it snaps back, and the ball goes flying. Not very far, but it at least clears the pipe every time.

...

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Open Shop/Office Hours: [1/30]

OOC